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In The accepted answer by durron597 to A guide to Code Review for Stack Overflow users, it is prescribed:

Please do not vote to close with a custom reason that "it belongs on Code Review".

Some of us who see the auto-generated comments reply with a blurb and link to the aforementioned post.

Is it appropriate also to flag the comment for moderator intervention or "too chatty", lest other users see it and use the same reason to vote for closure, or would such action be a waste of our (and the moderators') time?

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    \$\begingroup\$ I personally don't flag, I think others do. The comments seem to get cleaned up regularly by SO moderators, so I guess they're ok to be flagged \$\endgroup\$
    – Peilonrayz Mod
    May 16, 2018 at 15:02
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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm fine with these being flagged. Do respond to the commenter to educate them about how to use flagging when you can! \$\endgroup\$
    – Martijn Pieters
    May 16, 2018 at 15:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ I'm really confused here. Are we talking about comments that show up because they were custom on SO, then it gets migrated to CR and the comments come with it? \$\endgroup\$
    – Raystafarian
    May 22, 2018 at 6:22
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Raystafarian no it is while the post is on SO, typically before there are 5 close votes \$\endgroup\$
    – Sᴀᴍ Onᴇᴌᴀ Mod
    May 22, 2018 at 12:51

1 Answer 1

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Comments are, by intent, disposable. They are not designed to be part of the permanent record of the post. If something should be part of the permanent record, that something should be accomplished by editing the post.

In general, any comment that is chatty, or outdated, should be flagged.

If you feel the comment has served its purpose, or never had a purpose, then flag it as no-longer-needed. Obviously, the moderator who fields the flag will have the final say.

Having said that, I ruthlessly delete comments that are flagged, and seldom even look into the context of the comment. If someone flags a comment and I don't see any reason to keep the comment, I will just delete it, and move on. Only if there is something "different" about the comment will I even look to see the comment's context. So, if you want a lot of comments deleted from a single post, you should flag all the comments to be deleted, not just one....

Since this is about flagging comments on the SO site (and not here.... on Code Review), I'll reach out to some of their mods and get their opinion on this as well.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I commented on the question, as a single SO moderator. \$\endgroup\$
    – Martijn Pieters
    May 16, 2018 at 15:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ It looks like Simon reached out to the SO mods before I did ;-) Thanks Simon. \$\endgroup\$
    – rolfl
    May 16, 2018 at 15:28

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